THE MEDIA AND THE WAR….Via Instapundit, Michael Barone lashes out at war criticism today and sets up the usual tiresome anti-media strawman:
But for the most part, Roosevelt did not have to deal with one problem Bush faces today. And that is that today’s press works to put the worst possible face on the war.
It’s true that there wasn’t much public criticism of World War II, and I think the same can be said of World War I as well. But it hasn’t been true of any other war in America’s history.
Kosovo, Gulf War I, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, the Spanish-American War, the Civil War ? I could go on and on. Every single one of them faced a barrage of criticism from opponents who thought they were foolish, immoral, poorly prosecuted, or all of the above. To suggest that press criticism of a war is somehow unprecedented is to turn history upside down.
These guys need to get their heads out of the sand. The press isn’t reporting bad news from Iraq because they hate America, they’re reporting bad news from Iraq because there’s lots of bad news in Iraq. If war supporters really want to win this war, they should stop whining that the press is reporting the news and instead try to figure out how to actually make the news better.
As near as I can tell, though, a lot of them have basically given up and are already setting the stage for Phase 2: figuring out a way to blame liberals and the press for the fiasco in Iraq even though George Bush and his team have been in charge of every single detail of it and have gotten every single dollar they’ve asked for. I can’t wait.
